Ras Baraka’s Newark Victory

Ras Baraka began his political career twenty years ago, riding the reputation of his father, the radical poet Amiri Baraka, who had been a well-known and galvanizing force in Newark since riots tore through the city in 1967. The younger Baraka made his name as a community organizer, a public-school teacher, the principal of Central High School, and a city councilman, positioning himself as a champion of the dispossessed. Over the past four years, drawing on his father’s fiery legacy and his own raw political talent, he became the chief antagonist of the city’s mayor, Cory Booker.

Last November, Booker left the mayor’s office for the Senate after a special election, and yesterday, Tuesday, May 13th, Newark voters decisively elected Baraka to begin the post-Cory Booker era. Baraka, who is forty-four years old, ran on a promise to “take Newark back” from political bosses, Wall Street investors, and Governor Chris Christie, whose agendas, he said, had not served the city’s struggling people.

“Today, we told them that the people of Newark are not for sale!” Baraka declared, to cheers from hundreds of supporters who packed a ballroom at the Robert Treat Hotel. “We told them that people outweigh money in a democracy! That Broad Street should be more important than Wall Street!” He had opened his victory speech by thanking his father, who died in January, “for believing in me all the way to the last days of his life, passing out fliers from his hospital bed.” Noting that the opposition had made his father’s radicalism a campaign issue, he said, through tears, “So he was here with us all the way to the end.”

Baraka defeated the former assistant state attorney general Shavar Jeffries, winning fifty-four per cent of the vote to Jeffries’s forty-six. Jeffries, who was twenty-three points behind only six weeks ago, rose quickly in the polls in the campaign’s final month. He was helped by $2.1 million in contributions from Education Reform Now, the political-financing arm of Democrats for Education Reform, a group founded by Wall Street financial executives who champion charter schools to support campaigns that back school reforms of the sort that are opposed by teachers’ unions. President Barack Obama and Booker were among their beneficiaries. Jeffries called for the expansion of charter schools, while Baraka has been a longtime opponent of them, although he moderated his views during the campaign. Education-workers unions in Newark and statewide backed Baraka, and their leaders shared the stage with him during his victory speech. Jeffries also had the backing of the Essex County Democratic Party machine and its leader, Joe DiVincenzo, who is widely known as a “Christiecrat” for having crossed party lines, last year, to support Christie’s reëlection.

Along with jobs and rampant violent crime, education was a leading issue in the election, largely because of a controversial and sweeping re-organization of the school district. The Newark schools superintendent Cami Anderson is carrying out the reforms in the face of widespread opposition from unions and many parents. On Tuesday night, I asked a canvasser for Baraka if voters were talking about the schools on Election Day. “That’s all they were talking about,” she said.

Baraka made Anderson a foil in his campaign to take control of Newark back from outsiders, calling for her resignation in almost every speech. In 2011, Christie and Booker jointly selected Anderson to be superintendent, part of an effort to transform the perennially failing Newark school district with the help of a hundred-million-dollar gift from the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Anderson answers to the state, not to the locally elected school board; the Newark district has been under state control for almost twenty years. (I wrote about Newark’s educational project in this week’s New Yorker.) Education reformers were eager for Anderson to proceed with the plan she calls One Newark, which includes turning three of the district’s lowest-performing schools over to charter schools. It also includes an enrollment system under which all families can apply to any school in Newark, charter or district.

Baraka didn’t mention Anderson in his victory speech, but, when I asked him afterward how he would address her plans, he answered, “She’s gotta go.”

Shavar Jeffries was also critical of Anderson, but said that he would try to work with her to implement One Newark. Jeffries, like Baraka, is a Newark native. He was born to a teen-age mother who was murdered when he was ten, was raised by his grandmother, was awarded scholarships to attend an élite suburban prep school and then Duke University, where he excelled, and went on to Columbia Law School. He returned to Newark, where he worked as a civil-rights attorney, helped to found a network of charter schools, and become president of the district school board.

Jeffries had warned voters that Baraka would threaten investment in Newark with his angry, anti-Wall Street rhetoric. “We need a mayor, not a protester-in-chief,” he and his surrogates said. With the help of money from the education-reform movement, an independent-expenditure group called Newark First ran television ads attacking Baraka for holding two public jobs—principal and councilman—with a combined salary exceeding two hundred thousand dollars, and for having his brother, Amiri Baraka, Jr., on his city-council staff.

Throughout the campaign, Baraka made an effort to signal that he would not govern as a fiery radical. He said that he had nothing against charter schools if they served children well, although he opposed the closing of district schools to make room for them. He also said that he would work collaboratively with Wall Street or any investors, as long as they put money in Newark’s impoverished neighborhoods as well as in its rebounding downtown.

Booker did not endorse a candidate, although his education and political philosophies are far closer to Jeffries’s than Baraka’s. When I asked him why, in an interview last month, he said, “I’ve got to work with whoever is in office, and I’m not going to make an enemy.”

The mood at Baraka’s victory party resembled that of a liberation movement as much as a campaign. Besides union and longtime community activists, the crowd included dozens of Baraka’s former students from Newark’s Central High School, who said that they had worked throughout the campaign “to support my principal.” In attendance was Leonard Jeffries, Jr., a classmate of Amiri Baraka’s in his youth in Newark and a professor of black studies at City College, who was removed as the chairman of the department, in 1991, for saying in a speech that Jews had financed the slave trade and undermined black people through their influence over movies. “The corporations have taken over the schools, and now they’ll go back to the people,” Leonard Jeffries said.

Also present was Pastor Mamie Bridgeforth, a former city councilwoman, who recalled being a young mother of three with little money when Kenneth Gibson was elected as Newark’s first black mayor, in 1970. “I have not seen young people in Newark this excited since that time,” she said. Her three daughters, now grown, were celebrating with her. She went on, “Ras spoke to the hearts of our children. Our children needed it and God Almighty heard.”

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